Some governments have found a cheaper way to crush dissent than paying police or trusting the army: persuade citizens that repression is a religious duty and hand them the online tools to carry it out. A new formal model argues that this combination can push people to attack targets they know pose no real threat.
The paper is by Fasih Zulfiqar of Duke University’s Department of Economics. It was posted to SSRN on January 27, 2026, with a revision on February 4, 2026.
Why rational autocrats empower mobs
The puzzle the paper starts from is that regimes with precise digital surveillance tools still choose to empower volatile, decentralized religious mobs. Standard models treat repression as costly: police, firewalls and a strong military drain money and create coup risks.
Zulfiqar calls the alternative “sacralized digital authoritarianism.” Instead of using technology mainly to raise the cost of dissent, regimes use it to change citizens’ own payoffs from repressing others.
He formalizes this with a game-theory model built on two levers. The first is sacralization: framing dissent as a threat to the sacred, so that joining in repression brings a sense of spiritual reward. The second is digital crowdsourcing: platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram that let people coordinate, so that taking part becomes more attractive the more others join, and refusing can bring online shaming.
The threat no longer has to be real
In the model, citizens decide whether to join repression based on noisy signals about how dangerous a target group really is. The key result concerns the “minimum necessary grievance,” the level of genuine threat needed before mass violence breaks out. Both levers push that threshold down.
If the sacred reward is large enough, the threshold can turn negative. In that case, the model predicts, citizens will repress a group “even if they know the target is objectively innocent.” The regime gets mass repression while spending little of its own resources, and can blame “public sentiment” rather than state policy.
Cases from Turkey to India
The paper then compares cases, including Turkey, Pakistan, China and India, and examines France as an example of secular sacralization inside a democracy. It describes Turkey’s religious affairs body using TikTok and WhatsApp to amplify anti-Kurdish rhetoric, Pakistan’s telecom regulator urging users to report “blasphemous” content, and anti-Muslim campaigns spread over WhatsApp in India. It also returns to Myanmar, where Buddhist nationalist propaganda on Facebook preceded violence against the Rohingya.
Zulfiqar also points to vaguely defined offenses, such as Turkey’s law against “insulting religious values,” as a deliberate tool: keeping the definition of the sacred fluid makes it harder for citizens to coordinate on refusing.
The model has limits the author acknowledges. It treats the two levers as given, while in reality regimes must pay to build them, by co-opting clergy or investing in platforms. He argues this explains why the strategy is most common where religious or nationalist divisions already exist and the sacred is cheap to manufacture. He also notes it can backfire: repression that is not effectively sacralized and crowdsourced can draw attention to its victims instead.
Study Details:
- Title: Faith, Tech, and the Mob: A Formal Theory of Authoritarian Cost-Reduction
- Authors: Fasih Zulfiqar
- Journal: Working paper (SSRN)
- Publication Date: January 27, 2026
- DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.6017054